Insurance is a form of risk management primarily used to hedge against the risk of a contingent loss, and may be defined as the equitable transfer of the risk of a loss, from one entity to another, in exchange for a premium. An insurer is a company that sells insurance. An insurance rate is a factor used to determine the amount, called the premium, to be charged for a certain amount of insurance coverage. Adding personal property items to an insurance policy is a manual and time consuming process and is often neglected by the owner of the items.
A home inventory of personal property items is useful in conjunction with insuring those items. A user may have a handwritten inventory, but this may be destroyed in a loss that also destroys the items. The user may store the inventory in a difficult to access location, such as a safe deposit box, which makes updating the inventory burdensome. Maintaining a home inventory is a time consuming process and therefore many people do not maintain a home inventory or keep a home inventory up to date. This may leave some of their personal property items unprotected by insurance.